Brandon Thomas, developer of ArtCraft, a suite of open-source creative tools meant to replicate Adobe applications for free, has now announced apps to replace Microsoft Office tools such as Excel, PowerPoint, and Word, respectively, named GridCraft, DeckCraft, and WordCraft, that are created with Claude. Thomas has shared his new clones to ArtCraft GitHub, making them free for all to download.
not interested in openslop
So who’s going to go ahead and reverse engineer drop in replacements for all the proprietary tech that keeps these oligarch money engines alive on consumer and business markets for professional software protected by giant moats of development work?
From how I see the situation: same people as before: nobody.
I gladly welcome this AI slop. It doesn’t hurt us. Actually the opposite. This shit is a thorn in the side of the worst companies. Particularly, companies that are also shoving AI down our throats. Let’s shove a little AI down their throats for once, huh?
The Open Document Foundation
I’m aware of the the suite including LibreOffice. It’s not popular with exactly the user base we’re concerned with here. Mostly because of aesthetic and integrations. If you dumped a hundred thousand dev hours into it, I’m sure it could find its way there. Otherwise, it’s still an excellent choice for who would otherwise be Linux users anyhow.
However, LibreOffice shouldn’t have to copy Microsoft. It would be ashame if it did too much.
This project, on the other hand, is precisely doing a clean room copy of Microsoft’s (et al) software. Not only does it go further as a drop-in replacement, but it’s also a form of protest in itself.
It’s not necessary for LibreOffice to fully replicate every nuance of MS Office to be valuable to people who aren’t just those who “would be Linux users anyhow.”
Especially for the light users of MS Office, which are the vast majority. They just need something to create Aunt Bobbie’s birthday invitation, and they won’t care at all whether that thing is MS Office or LibreOffice.
As an anecdote, I’m the IT person at my job. I quietly removed MS Office from a shared PC used by dozens of people. I installed LibreOffice instead, and selected the ribbon UI option. Months later now, and literally nobody has complained or even remarked on it, despite using it every day for their document work. There has not yet been a single instance of anyone contacting me for tech support about it.